Anxiety Dreams
BY EMILY SKAJA
Someone gave me 30 lions a year ago
& I just remembered they’re upstairs.
I’m in a math test, a coffin, a play,
I’m literally Hamlet & I didn’t prepare.
T.S. Eliot found out that I said “The Waste Land”
is overrated. There’s a man with a bayonet
in the corner of my bedroom & I’m about to die
commenting on his niche choice of weaponry.
The whole world is counting on me
to stop an asteroid from obliterating Earth
but I missed my window because
there’s an ADHD medication shortage
in space. My teeth have turned into grapes.
I’m in the dentist’s chair, he’s telling me
he never much got into poetry himself,
& I say that’s okay, I never got into dentistry
either. Then I spit raisins all over the chair.
I’m driving on a bridge when I remember I’m God
& I forgot to save my draft of the Mississippi River.
My car careens into the abyss, I forget how
to roll up the windows, the abyss leaks in
& the door won’t open & oh my God I’m that God
who caused the embarrassingly unpoetic
death of God & now everyone is furious.
Future Fig
BY EMILY SKAJA
You lived & died in one long summer.
The world gave you three full moons,
a pair of elderly dogs who somehow knew
you were in there, half a crocheted blanket,
& grandparents who spent a long weekend
building you a door for your room.
I bought a snow globe for the sonogram.
We listened to your heartbeat,
followed along as you grew
from chia seed to blueberry to fig.
It’s true I don’t know what kind of mother
you would have wanted me to be.
I once killed three summers of tomato plants
before I found, to my surprise,
a whole uninvited cucumber
shoved up out of a crack in the concrete.
This is the kind of thing, in my era
of grieving, that passes for parable.
Maybe that was meant to be
my one chance from God
to love something I wouldn’t try to earn,
& here I let the squirrels take it. Classic me.
I ask my brother to tell his children
that our baby went to another family
because I want a world where that can be true,
someone somewhere planting a seed
& someone else astonished by their luck.
But I hope there will be some part of you
returned to us, my once
& future fig, lime, honeydew.
When you died, your aunties sent us
a weeping cherry tree. We dug the hole
& read the tag: Bright sun. Flowers in spring.
Spring Comes to the Black Lake
BY EMILY SKAJA
“The lake will wait.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks
charge up out of the ground on their revenge circuit & chickweed clings to the
sidewalk as if to say please, please let me stay. The due date passes & the cherry tree
opens its pale flowers in apology. Still, it’s not enough. I want a whiff of hyacinths so
strong it forms a banner that I can crash through like a quarterback. I want magnolias
so stunning they cause minor traffic accidents. A whole garden of birds
clustered around the sprinkler nozzle, bickering over who gets to fly through the rainbow of
water first. Every 30 days I bleed & the crepe myrtles pelt me with pink confetti to
remind me I’m the bride of this season. Zombie season, cannibal season, season lying
in wait. When Spring yanks me from the underworld I find myself pressed into her
service—seeding an herb garden, measuring rainfall, squinting dazedly into the sun. I
look at all the life she’s made from decay & understand it as a promise: she will take
me dead or alive. I fly her colors. Circle the calendar dates. I open my trembling hands,
